After Omni-Man’s release in Mortal Kombat 1, creator Ed Boon has since sheepishly admitted that he meant to add Terence Fletcher from hit film Whiplash instead.
“Yeah, this one’s on me,” Boon said in an interview. “I never said a character’s name specifically. I just called up JK Simmons and asked him to come act for ‘the most brutal character he’s ever portrayed.’ I thought we’d be on the same page about who that was, but, obviously, that wasn’t the case.”
The writers on staff at Netherrealm Studios were caught just as off guard as Boon.
“I wasted so much time writing pre-fight dialogue for Fletcher,” said writer Marcus Greene. “So much in there that no one will ever get to see now. We even had special dialogue for when he wins via timeout where he said ‘not quite my tempo’ to the opponent. It would’ve been such a fun callback for fans of Whiplash, but I guess this Omni-Man guy is fine, too.”
“Really, I just wanted to see a fatality where he decapitated a guy with a cymbal,” Greene concluded somberly.
The actor behind Invincible‘s Omni-Man, JK Simmons, even expressed a bit of disappointment himself.
“Of course when he said ‘your most brutal character,’ my mind went to Omni-Man. He did kill everyone on a subway to prove a point to his son, so that one’s 100% on Boon for the confusion,” Simmons said. “But now that I have the idea of a Fletcher appearance in Mortal Kombat in my head I can’t get it out. Is there a way I can pay them to do that?”
At press time, Netherrealm Studios reportedly fast-tracked plans to instead feature Fletcher in Kombat Pack 2, alongside the addition of Miles Teller’s Andrew Neiman as a Kameo fighter.
